


held on as tightly (as you held on to me)

by wolfinglet



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Capgras Syndrome-esque happenings, Domesticity, Dream life, M/M, Married Couple, No Actual Character Death, Nogitsune mindfuckery, Set during and post-3.19
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-19
Updated: 2014-02-19
Packaged: 2018-01-13 02:52:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,194
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1210006
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wolfinglet/pseuds/wolfinglet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“That was the least smooth segue ever. Terrible. I want a divorce,” Stiles says.</p><p>Derek quirks an eyebrow, crowding closer.</p><p>“I mean it. You’re a menace.”</p><p>Derek drops his hands to Stiles’s waist, thumbing at the band of his sweats. </p><p>“Horrible. Awful.”</p><p>“Mmhmm,” Derek hums, dragging his fingers over the sensitive juts of Stiles’s hipbones.</p><p>“A monster,” Stiles says.</p><p>And Derek, just for a second, freezes.</p><p>This is where it starts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	held on as tightly (as you held on to me)

**Author's Note:**

> Set during and post-3.19. Timeline follows canon events exactly up until the end of 3.18.
> 
> Title lyrics from the theme song "To Build a Home" by The Cinematic Orchestra.
> 
>  **Content warnings:** this fic contains a scene where one character commits murder/suicide in order to escape a false reality and a scene where a character has sex with someone they believe is their husband, but he is not. Fic also contains mentions of unhealthy eating habits (a character forgetting to eat with increasing frequency), descriptions of panic attacks, and stalkery behavior from unnamed background characters.

The thing wearing Derek Hale’s face is making Stiles breakfast.

But that’s not where it starts.

—-

A couple months before, it starts. Stiles is reading in his chair in a corner of the living room, the chunky, kitschy lamp Derek hates shining a yellow halo down on his homework. He took a break from school for a while, debated ditching his degree altogether when his dad died, but Derek pushed him back into it because he knew, he knew Stiles really did want to go back.

He didn’t want to go back for freshman anthropology, though. Ugh.

He groans and drops his head back over the arm of the chair, lets it bend his neck until it cracks. Spinks (spelled that way because of an extremely unfortunate animal shelter “birth” certificate mistake) is curled up on the top of the back cushion, and Stiles ruffles her tail with one finger until she stirs, blinking blearily at him.

“Yeah, yeah,” he says. “‘Finish your homework, Stiles’. ‘Be a good student, Stiles’. ‘If you get an A on your exam, I’ll blow you in the shower, Stiles’. I’ve got your dad’s speech memorized.” He lowers his voice conspiratorially. “Not that the last part is terrible. It’s the principle of the thing.”

Derek doesn’t have to be a good student. He graduated five years ago from the same police academy Stiles was considering joining and was promoted a few months back, so he doesn’t have to bullshit his way through econ homework or chemistry labs on his way to an ancient history-slash-education degree ( _why_ does Stiles even need chemistry, ever, ever ever ever), but he does have insane, stupid work hours.

Like right now, it’s almost midnight, and—

“I forgot to eat. _Shit_.” Stiles snaps his textbook closed and extracts his aching body from the chair. When the hell did he last eat? He remembers feeding Spinks at like six, but he hasn’t eaten since . . . ?

. . . ?

For a long second, he can’t remember eating at all. It’s a surge of the weirdest déjà vu under his skin—or backwards déjà vu? Is that a thing? Déjà vu where he doesn’t remember anything at all for a hot, blank second, and then he’s back on his feet in the middle of his living room, in the house he shares with Derek, and Spinks is giving him a queer look, her eyes perfectly round.

“Oh-kay then,” he says. “It’s definitely food time.” 

—-

Stiles would like to have a twee meet-cute story like all the other couples he knows in his classes (most of whom are three or four whole years younger than Stiles, but he apparently passes for twenty still, so he’ll take it), but really, he met Derek because Derek was arresting him.

“I swear to god,” Stiles was saying, “it wasn’t my fault! Seriously!” He jabbed a finger at the student he’d half-sideswiped. “He stepped right out in front of me!”

The police officer who was taking his statement had the most done look on his face of anyone Stiles had seen in his entire life. Just done. So done. But Stiles wasn’t done. Because Stiles’s Jeep was a flaming fucking wreck, its hood crunched in half around the telephone pole he’d hit to avoid completely taking the guy out.

“Students’ rights!” the guy yelled back. “You should look where you’re going!”

“I should— _I should_ —I _am_ a student!”

And then a heavy hand landed on Stiles’s shoulder and a serious voice said, “I’m going to need you to come down to the station.” 

It was a pathetic puppy crush at first handcuff. There were many more handcuffs after that, but more the fun, fuzzy kind, less the horrible metal twisting kind that Stiles knew how to get out of, but he figured wrangling himself out of handcuffs? Not the best way to make friends with a cop in his new town.

“Why are you even arresting me?” he asked on the way down to the station. He was in the back like an actual criminal, and oh god, his dad was going to _murder_ him. In the first degree. Slowly. “Why did you _handcuff_ me? I didn’t do anything!”

“You hit a student.”

“I am a student! And I _grazed_ him.”

The cop sighed. His stubble was so great. Being arrested by him couldn’t diminish the greatness of stubble _that great_. “Students never look when they’re walking around here. We’ve had a lot of problems with them getting hit, so we’re required to file reports every time it happens. The city’s idea, so we can get more stop signs and crosswalks put in.” His eyes flicked to the rearview. They weren’t dark, like Stiles had thought at first—they were a hazel-green, brighter when the sun caught them. They were pretty.

Ridiculously pretty.

“It doesn’t help that you were engaging the victim in a verbal altercation, either.” Ugh, twenty-five-cent cop words. It took Stiles straight back to being fourteen with the biggest infatuation centered right on his dad’s then-deputy, Lydia.

“Fuck me,” Stiles muttered. The cop’s eyebrows jumped. Those were magnificent, too. Stiles wasn’t sure what this guy had that _wasn’t_ magnificent.

Aaand now he was thinking about, uh. Below-the-belt magnificent.

“I was cursing,” he said swiftly. “To myself. That was a curse. I’m not propositioning you or anything. I guess that’s kind of a bad curse, huh. I said it in class once and I think my teacher about shit himself. I mean, uh, he—wasn’t happy. But like, I think he thought I actually meant it, because I was kind of failing that class, and—”

“Stiles,” the cop said. Oh, man, Stiles wanted him to say his name more. He had a nice voice, not as deep as Stiles would have expected given all of . . . that, tenor and easy to listen to. “Stop talking.”

“Yeah, that’s the thing. I kind of never do. So if I have to put up with you arresting me, then you have to put up with me talking. I could talk about something else. I could talk about the Miranda rights for the rest of the ride.”

The cop’s eyebrows raised again. “You know the Miranda rights?”

“My dad’s a sheriff.”

There was a long silence. Then, “Huh.”

“Huh? Huh what?”

“Huh, you’d think a sheriff’s kid would have enough sense to not get himself arrested.”

“Whoa, hey!” Stiles protested. “You’re the one who said the city’s all blah blah blah crosswalks! This kid seriously—if anything, he sideswiped _me_ —”

“That makes no sense. Where are you from?” the cop interrupted. 

“Maryland,” Stiles said. “You?”

“Here.” 

“You went to WU?” Washington University is the last place Stiles thought he’d end up, but his dad had suggested not so gently that getting away from Beacon would be a good thing for him. Stiles had withdrawn a lot when his mom died, hadn’t made many friends after. Had been _friendly_ , sure, but Stiles was totally self-conscious and self-aware, and knew that him being “friendly” meant him interacting with people he liked in a never-ending, rotating combination of clingy, cold, and meanly sarcastic. 

“Yeah,” cop guy said. Stiles thought he was going to have to prompt him further, but he went on a few seconds later. “Only for a year. I had to take some time off to help out with a family situation.”

Something niggled at the back of Stiles’s brain, like he was tugging a string tied there. “What happened?”

The cop frowned at him, then flicked his signal on and made an abrupt right turn. “We’re here.”

He took Stiles inside, sat him down, and started a drawn-out phone conversation with one of the city officials about how another accident had been caused, and could they have those crosswalks and regulatory signs yet? 

And Stiles sat there, watching Derek Hale—thank you, desk nameplate—argue on the phone about the protection of students and drivers both, and how he would personally be willing to pay more taxes if they would stop having to cart people to the hospital, and Stiles—Stiles fell a little in love with the hard, unbending way he put in for what he believed. The way he fought. Stick an “I want to believe” poster up on his office wall and call it done.

When he could see Derek getting frustrated, his free hand clenched on his desk, Stiles reached over and yanked the phone cord, dragging the phone across the table to him. Derek stared, stunned, and in the spare second Stiles had before Derek reached to take the phone back, he put it to his ear and said, “Hello?”

He launched into a spiel about crosswalks and being a new citizen but a dedicated WU student, and wasn’t it safer? Wasn’t it more welcoming? Stiles was certain the accident would have been avoided if there had been a crosswalk there. He had seen at least six accidents there since arriving. It made more sense.

The woman on the other side of the phone was quiet when he finally shut himself up. Then she said, “Who are you?”

“I told—Stiles. It’s Stiles—”

Stiles . . . ?

“Stilinski!” he said. Jesus. Maybe he needed to eat something. He was getting worse and worse about remembering to eat on time. “Stiles Stilinski, sorry, I was the one who caused today’s accident?” Ouch, that burned to say. Derek was giving him this _look_ , though, and Stiles could afford to sacrifice some dignity for more of that.

“Right,” she said, her tone oddly vacant. “Put Deaton back on the phone, please.”

“Derek,” Stiles corrected, but he obeyed and passed the phone back to Derek, who was frowning at him with judgmental eyebrows going on. 

“Right, Derek,” Derek said, cradling the phone.

Stiles squinted at him. “I . . . think she wanted to talk to you more.”

“What?” Derek’s gaze sharpened, and he took his hand off the phone. “Oh. She’ll call back. She always does,” he muttered. He turned some papers and pushed them at Stiles. “Sign these and I’ll let you go.”

Stiles signed them to keep himself from saying something dumb like, _What if I don’t want you to let me go?_

Because there was no way that could be taken well. Hitting on the officer who arrested you? Tack-y. Tacky as all hell. So tacky. Stiles would never do that. Stiles would absolutely never—

“So,” Stiles said, turning the papers around. “What are you doing for dinner?”

—-

Stiles’s dad was not, to put it simply, pleased.

“Stiles,” he said. “You’re eighteen.”

“Well, yeah,” Stiles said.

“And he’s how old?”

“Well, uh. Twenty-five.”

“He’s too old,” Stiles’s dad said. 

“It’s not stat—”

“If you finish that sentence, Stiles, I swear to god.”

Stiles huffed a sigh and curled deeper into his blanket nest. Best thing about his teeny tiny dorm room? His bed was pushed in a corner, walls on two sides, and he could build the best blanket and pillow stacks of all mankind. “I am _of age_ , and Dad, he’s really cool, okay? And you’ve gotta give him points for being a cop.”

“Did he _ask_ if you were eighteen?”

“Yes, Dad. Seriously, he did. That was the first thing he did.” His dad made wordless grumbling noises, so Stiles forged on. “You said to meet people! Make friends!”

“I didn’t mean get a boyfriend, son. Especially one who’s seven years older than you. People that age are looking for different things. You need to focus on school.” 

Stiles could feel himself getting frustrated, but he shut up anyway and put up with it, because his dad had vaguely alluded to the fact that he’d been engaged when he was young, and it hadn’t worked out. But Stiles just wanted a boyfriend, man. He didn’t want engagement or anything super-serious. 

“Dad,” he said. “I just—” He paused. What had he been about to say? _I just want to date someone. I just want a boyfriend. I just want . . ._

But those didn’t feel true. Not any of them. Stiles stared at his dorm wall, puzzled, until he realized his dad was saying his name.

“Son? Stiles?”

“Sorry,” Stiles said. “I think I cut out? Anyway, Dad, I just wanna give it a shot. I promise not to do anything you wouldn’t do.”

His dad made a strangled noise. “Stiles—”

“Don’t worry about me, Dad.”

He expected a familiar _yeah right_ , but instead his dad went weirdly silent, then said, “Okay.”

The next five times Stiles called back home, the phone rang and rang endlessly, like there wasn’t anyone there at all.

—-

Derek and Stiles’s first date was a movie.

It was the worst best date ever.

First, Stiles fucked up which movie they were going to see. Or, no—first, he had to call the repair shop, and they were going to be another week on his Jeep because they needed parts shipped in from Florida or something, so Stiles had to call Derek last minute and ask for a ride. 

_Then_ he fucked up what they were going to see. Turned out there was a big difference between asking for tickets for _Silent House_ and tickets for _Safe House_. Not that Stiles would complain about staring at Denzel Washington for a couple hours. The movie was predictable, though, and kind of boring, and Stiles had laid his hand on the middle armrest between him and Derek, and Derek . . . wasn’t touching him.

He seemed kind of tuned out, actually—he wasn’t looking at the screen, quite, but he wasn’t watching Stiles, either. He looked paused in place, frozen, and Stiles wondered if he was one of those people who got so absorbed they forgot the world, but Derek startled back to life when Stiles brushed their ankles together.

“Dude,” he said. “You good?”

“Fine,” Derek said. He cocked his head and gave Stiles a warm smile. “Look,” he said, “the movie’s great, but do you want to . . . ?” His expression turned shy, and Stiles didn’t need adequate light to know he was blushing.

Holy shit. 

“Uh, _yes_ ,” he said, and took Derek’s hand.

—-

Derek had an apartment on the outskirts of town, high up and big and open. Familiar-looking. Stiles thought maybe it looked like something from the set of _Glee_ (yes, shh, he watched it despite the total shitshow it was), with high, exposed ceiling beams, hardwood floors, and a very hipster New York metal staircase twining upward.

He pretty much wanted Derek to fuck him on every inch of everything.

They almost managed it.

—-

Derek’s family lives in North Carolina now. Bad blood in the town around WU, Derek explained one night. Stiles was exhausted and come-sticky, and Derek was licking his stomach clean in slow swipes. It was kind of weird, maybe, to be talking about Derek’s family while Derek was lapping their sex off him, but Stiles got the feeling a lot of their lives were weird.

Well, in the couple months he’d known Derek. Their lives were weird. Yeah, that.

“There was a fire,” Derek said, touching Stiles’s thighs. It took Stiles a second to realize Derek was asking him to part them, so he did, and Derek settled between them, his cheek resting on Stiles’s hip. That probably should have been weird, too, but Stiles was too sex-wrecked to get it up again, and Derek looked . . . comfortable, curled up there like a cat.

“Arson?”

Derek blinked at him. “Yes.”

“I had a feeling,” Stiles explained. That was as much as he could explain. He’d just known. “There was a big arson case in Beacon, too.” He swam back through his memories and got caught, sticky and thick. “Ugh, I don’t remember,” he conceded eventually. “Too tired to remember. You fucked memory out of me.”

“Good,” Derek said, and kissed the inside of his closest thigh.

—-

It seemed like a tacit agreement that Derek would go home with Stiles for spring break.

It was tacit, really. Stiles booked two tickets home and Derek left his datebook in Stiles’s dorm room one night after dropping him off. It was odd that he carried it around with him, but hey, it let Stiles peek and see he’d booked spring break week off.

Flying home was a lot better when he had Derek to snuggle up next to in the uncomfortable airport chairs, and Derek’s shoulder to fall asleep on during the five-hour flight. Their flight attendant had a flat voice, and honestly, he kind of spooked Stiles a little, and he kept _looking_ at them like he thought they were going to have gay sex right there or rig the plane to explode. Stiles did his best to look like an innocent and curled up with his headphones in and the broad, comfortable plane of Derek’s shoulder under his cheek.

His dad met them at the airport, and it was adorable, the way Derek stiffened as soon as he spotted him. “Sir,” Derek said, hand out. 

Stiles’s dad shook it, looked him up and down, and said, “I expected you to look older.”

“Er,” Derek said. “Thank you?”

One more up-and-down, and Stiles’s dad nodded. “Separate rooms,” he said, and grabbed Stiles for a hug.

“Daaad,” Stiles muttered.

Over his dad’s shoulder, he saw Derek smile. It looked a little lost.

—-

Stiles wasn’t sure what was up with Derek’s family. When his first year of college rounded out and summer break hit them like a freaking bus of long-distance relationship, Stiles called Derek and said, “Are you coming home at all?”

“To Maryland?” Derek asked, clearly distracted.

“Are you driving right now?” Stiles demanded, sitting up in bed. His glorious, glorious queen-size bed that he didn’t almost fall off every time he moved. 

There was suspicious silence from Derek’s end of the line.

“Dude! You’re an officer of the law!”

“I’ve passed every driving test there is,” Derek grumbled.

“Irresponsible.” Stiles flopped back, rubbing a hand over his face. “No, I mean _home_. Back to Carolina.”

“Oh,” Derek said. “No, probably not.”

Stiles brought it up again a few weeks later, but Derek was equally uninterested then. He _was_ interested in visiting Stiles, though suggesting it was probably to broker for Stiles’s pestering to stop. Stiles stopped, because hell, who would deny Derek Hotface/ass Hale the right to visit if he wanted to? And for someone who’d been a virgin for eighteen years, Stiles was pretty used to regular sex, and suddenly not getting laid? Not great.

In all the time Stiles knows Derek, he never visits his family.

Two weeks before Derek dies, Stiles checks his phone. He’s avoided doing this for a long time, because a) he trusts Derek not to cheat on him, and if he’s checking Derek’s phone, it looks like he’s scoping for cheating behavior, and b) it’s a generally creepy, gross thing to do. But he does it.

There’s only one number saved, and it’s Stiles’s.

—-

Stiles is making pasta and tossing Spinks treats when Derek comes home. He makes it two steps inside the door before he calls, “That smells amazing. I want some.”

“No way,” Stiles calls back, listening to the familiar sounds of Derek kicking his shoes off and hanging his belt up on the hook by the door. “It’s all mine, all for me.”

Derek comes into the kitchen grinning, one of those small grins that only Stiles gets, soft and warm. “Hey,” he says, and pulls Stiles into a kiss. Spinks gets between them, winding around Derek’s ankles and rubbing up against Stiles’s shins, but it’s routine, it’s usual, it’s _home_ , and Stiles sighs into Derek’s mouth, thumbing at his pretty, stubble-covered jaw. Derek’s wedding band is cool where Derek is cupping his cheek.

“You’re distracting me from food,” Stiles says, his eyes still closed when Derek leans back. 

Derek kisses his forehead. “What is it you always say about rice?” he asks, a hint of slinky predator in his voice. Stiles cracks an eye open, and Derek’s really smiling now, a wide grin.

“That was the least smooth segue ever. Terrible. I want a divorce,” Stiles says.

Derek quirks an eyebrow, crowding closer.

“I mean it. You’re a menace.”

Derek drops his hands to Stiles’s waist, thumbing at the band of his sweats. 

“Horrible. Awful.”

“Mmhmm,” Derek hums, dragging his fingers over the sensitive juts of Stiles’s hipbones.

“A monster,” Stiles says.

And Derek, just for a second, freezes.

This is where it starts.

—-

Little things.

Stiles begins to notice the little things. Derek’s phone is one of them. Derek’s job is another. Stiles sees him out in his cruiser occasionally, but his hours are becoming more and more erratic, and when Stiles calls at three a.m. one night to see if Derek’s still there, the desk cop asks twice which Derek Stiles means, and his voice is empty, empty, empty. The same empty Derek’s gets sometimes, if Stiles isn’t holding his attention.

But Stiles thinks it might not be Derek’s attention.

It’s . . . something else.

—-

Spinks, too. Spinks isn’t right.

Spinks has a routine, Stiles gets that. They all live by routine. Stiles goes to classes and learns material he already knows, Stiles comes home at four-ish every day, Stiles does some of his freelance writing work, boring articles for fifteen bucks a pop that keep him afloat-ish financially. Derek’s the one who pays the house bills, though, while Stiles is in school.

Stiles isn’t sure where he gets that much money. This house’s mortgage is ridiculous. 

Isn’t it?

Back to Spinks—Spinks has a routine, too. The more Stiles pays attention to it, the less routine it seems, and more . . . tracked? On track. Stiles had those train sets as a kid that he could program to do certain things at certain times. Or Sims. That’s it. Spinks is acting like a Sim.

Has she been acting like a Sim the whole time?

Has everyone?

A week before Derek dies, Stiles goes to the grocery store and all the price tags are blank. When he looks up, squinting to see if he can find an employee, every single person is staring at him.

He runs out of the store.

Talking-while-driving lectures be damned, he calls Derek in the car. “I need you to come home,” he says, holding the phone too tightly. How do you tell your husband that you think you might be living in a computer simulation? That something is _wrong_. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Terrible, horrible, awful, monstrous, so wrong. Something is broken inside his world, inside _their_ world, but Stiles knows Derek is real.

Of all the things, he knows Derek is real.

“Derek,” he pleads, “come home.”

—-

The call came on a Tuesday, a year and a half after Stiles and Derek started dating. Stiles was in an eight a.m. class, yawning his way through it. Derek was on an early shift and hadn’t made coffee on his way out of their apartment, so Stiles was getting by on these gross energy crackers Derek bought and a mug of juice the size of his face.

It took him a while to realize he was buzzing.

Nine missed calls.

A cold stone sank into his gut.

He knew this feeling.

This was the same feeling he had when his mom called him home from first grade and said, “Honey, Scott had an accident.”

This was the same feeling he had when he was ten and his dad picked him up from school. “Your mom had an accident,” he said. Stiles’s dad never picked him up from school before that.

No one ever called him nine times.

“Mr. Stilinski?” the voice on the other end said. 

Stiles leaned on the closed doors of his lecture hall. “Tell me,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” the voice said. It was flat. “Your father had an accident.”

—-

Derek beats Stiles home from the store. He’s sitting at the kitchen table when Stiles stumbles his way inside, and Spinks is on his lap, ears curled forward the way she always does when Derek pets her head.

“Stiles?” Derek stands as soon as he sees him. “What’s—your heartbeat’s—” He cuts off, frowning, and it damn near sends Stiles into hysterics.

“My _heartbeat_?” he says. He wraps his hands around the edges of the cutout that leads into the kitchen, anchoring himself there. Spinks is staring at him, unblinking, from the top of the table. “What the fuck does that even mean?”

“I don’t know,” Derek says. He sounds sincere. “I just said it, sorry.” He steps toward Stiles, and Stiles steps back. Derek stops, deep hurt flashing across his face. “Stiles?”

The air feels like it’s vibrating. Cracking apart. Or is that Stiles? 

“Something’s wrong,” he says. “Something’s _wrong_ , Derek.”

“Nothing’s wrong.” Derek takes another step, his hands up, his face soft and understanding. “Stiles, are you having a panic attack?”

That must be it. Stiles clings to that. That must be it. He must be imagining things. Imagining the way Spinks is looking at him, like she’s _jealous_ , like she’s angry, like her eyes are narrowing, closing in on him.

Stiles pushes forward into Derek, curls himself down against his chest, fitting in a way he hasn’t quite been able to since he turned twenty and hit a belated growth spurt. Four years ago. “Derek,” he says into Derek’s warm skin. “Derek, I don’t know what’s going on.”

Derek’s hands smooth up his back, settle on his shoulder blades. “Nothing’s wrong,” he says. He sounds so freaking assured that Stiles can’t help but believe him—but _want_ to believe him. Stiles wants to believe. 

A warm spot blooms on the back of his neck, at the base of his skull, smoothing away all his tension and fear. Stiles relaxes slowly, melting into Derek’s arms. 

“That’s good,” Derek murmurs in his ear. “That’s good, Stiles.” He takes his hand off Stiles’s neck. “You’re good.”

Stiles lets Derek pick him up, carry him to bed. They have slow, slow sex, Derek curled over him, a shelter against the world.

He can’t remember why he was so upset.

—-

Whatever Derek did wears off the next day, when Stiles is sitting in his business ethics class. The terror comes swarming back. The certainty.

_Something is wrong._

He sold the house when his dad died, but the phone company didn’t disconnected his dad’s cell. Stiles calls it, listens to his familiar voicemail. Calls it again. Listens to his dad’s voice. It calms him, until he notices how tinny it sounds, how canned, how pre-prepared and cannibalized.

He walks out of class half an hour early, ignoring his professor calling his name, and goes straight to the bathroom to throw up the breakfast he didn’t eat. If he’s right, this school doesn’t exist. That professor doesn’t exist. If he’s right, this is some _Inception_ shit, and he. He needs Derek.

“Sorry,” he says when Derek’s phone picks up.

“Stiles, I’m at work,” Derek says, sounding annoyed. He never sounds annoyed anymore. They never fight anymore.

Fuck. 

“I know.” Stiles breaks into a run to get to his Jeep and works the door open. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I just really need you to come home. It’s an emergency, D, please.”

“No,” Derek says shortly, and hangs up.

Stiles stares at his phone, his driver’s side door still open, letting the hot breeze in. It’s fall. Stiles makes himself think about that instead of thinking about the fact that _Derek is one of them_.

Whoever “they” are. This is not his husband. This person he called, this person he talked to, the person who set his hand on Stiles’s neck yesterday and then fucked him until he couldn’t think anymore, that’s not Derek. That’s not _his_ Derek.

He gives himself one minute to be sad about it.

Then he drives.

—-

The thing wearing Derek Hale’s face is making Stiles breakfast.

Stiles spent the night in the Jeep in a park, unable to bring himself to come home. He woke up twice in the middle of the night thinking there were people with their faces pressed to his windows, looking in, but it was his imagination.

He hopes.

He isn’t sure what’s real anymore. 

His wedding band is real. He thought his marriage was real. A girl in his class went out for drinks with him and Derek a year or so ago, and when Derek was gone to the bathroom, she leaned over and said, “You’re _so_ lucky, bro.”

“Tell me about it,” Stiles said. He clinked his wedding ring against his beer bottle, savoring the sound of it. He was getting used to it, then. They were newly married, then, had gotten hitched at City Hall four years after they’d met, two and a half after his dad died and Derek went with him to the funeral and held him up all through it. Derek bought the house a week before, and he proposed on the front porch, and Stiles said yes immediately. 

“I mean it,” she said. “He loves you so much. You hang on to him.”

 _I’m trying_ , Stiles thinks. He takes a step into the house and closes the door. Doesn’t lock it behind him.

The thing wearing Derek Hale’s face is making Stiles breakfast.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” he says, his back to Stiles. “You didn’t come home.”

“I had some things to figure out,” Stiles says. 

“Did you figure them out?”

“Honestly? I have no idea.”

Derek turns around with a plate of scrambled eggs in one hand and his police-issue handgun in the other.

Stiles’s insides go very, very quiet.

“It took you a while,” Derek murmurs. 

“You’re not Derek,” Stiles says.

“I was.” 

“But not now.”

“Not lately,” Derek agrees. The cadence of his voice is off. None of the Derek who called Stiles ridiculous pet names like _dearheart_ (but only in bed), or who coaxed him through his silent orgasms (Stiles was always quiet right as he came), or who woke Stiles up late in the mornings on Saturdays with his real name low in his ear (Przemysław).

There’s none of that Derek here.

“This isn’t real,” Stiles says. He twists his wedding band out of nervous habit, and Derek-not-Derek’s eyes flick to it. “Were you always not him?” Stiles asks. He can’t help but ask. 

“I was Derek,” not-Derek says. “Cobbled together from your memories. Your fantasies. It took you long enough to _notice_.” No-tice, said like a bell clanging twice, high and teasing, _no-tice_. He leans over Spinks when she starts in on the plate of eggs, his gun loose and casual in his hand. “Do you get it yet?”

“No.” Stiles doesn’t. His face feels wet, and there’s a slow, ill sucking in his gut. Is he drowning? He’s drowning in something. Some part of him is drowning. He’s sick.

“You had everything you’ve always wanted here.” Not-Derek moves around the table, and Spinks glances up, her tail swishing so fast it blurs into multiples. “You could still have it all.” He holds a hand out at shoulder height, his fingers curved. Stiles understands from it that not-Derek means the hand-on-his-neck dealio, which . . . no thanks.

“I want—I want things back—” Stiles forces out. “I want to leave.”

Of all things, he knows he has to get out of here.

“You don’t,” not-Derek coaxes. His fingers twitch. Spinks’s eyes are turning white from the center of her pupils and bleeding outward. “You can have him back, though. I’ll give him back to you. Just stay here.”

“No,” Stiles says, vehement. No, how could this be everything he’s always wanted? Scott is dead, his mother is dead, his dad is dead, and Derek is gone. He trips over his feet to get away from the thing that was Derek. “No, get the fuck away from me. No way.”

Not-Derek’s expression hardens, and he moves too fast for Stiles to track, slamming into Stiles’s space and grabbing his wrist. “Fine,” he snarls, and for a second Stiles thinks it’s angry, he’s angry, it’s angry, it’s going to rip his throat out, but it doesn’t. It shoves the gun into Stiles’s hand, wearing Derek’s face, and it smiles.

“End it, then.”

_What?_

It wrenches Stiles’s arm up, putting the gun under its chin with his finger on the trigger. “Shoot the man you love,” it says, taunting. “Shoot him, Stiles. Can you? I’m not him, but this is his body.” It leans close to him, its lips half an inch from his, its Derek’s eyes locked on his. “So shoot him.”

Stiles doesn’t know a lot, but he does know this place isn’t real. Maybe Derek isn’t real. Stiles, though—Stiles knows _he_ is real.

Somewhere out there, there’s a Stiles Stilinski that’s real.

Stiles wants to believe that.

Stiles doesn’t know why he’s here.

Stiles doesn’t know why this is happening to him.

Stiles doesn’t know if he’ll ever see Derek again.

“Fuck you,” he says to the thing wearing Derek Hale’s face.

He wrenches his wrist out of its grip, fists his other hand in its shirt, and puts them temple-to-temple, then shoots them both through the head.

The last thing he feels is its wild, triumphant grin against his cheek.

—-

“Scott, I know you’re concerned, but what Stiles needs right now is air.” Deaton slots himself between Stiles’s supine body and Scott, who’s been hunched over him since Derek got here, his shirt caked with drying blood. Deaton gives Derek a meaningful look over Scott’s shoulder when Scott won’t move.

Derek steps in. “I’ll watch him, Scott,” he says. “Okay? Go get something to drink.” He says it with the deference of a beta—something he hopes he can be to Scott, soon—but he also says it firmly.

Scott looks at Stiles, then at Derek. “Just for a few minutes,” he says, and heads off. Deaton follows, leaving Derek alone with Stiles.

Stiles stinks of the poison. It’s covering up his scent. Derek is frankly getting tired of smelling things on Stiles that aren’t Stiles—anxiety, death, fox. A lot of fox. It had to be covering Stiles’s scent, too, when it was moving around Beacon Hills, planting its tricks. Disgusting. Derek’s skin itches at the thought of it in his loft. 

Stiles in his loft—not so bad. But the nogitsune? The nogitsune’s already inside Stiles, and that’s bad enough.

Derek touches Stiles’s wrist. Stiles is in pain, somewhere in there. Derek can feel it. He leeches it away, watching the black swirl up his arm, seep into his veins. His body absorbs it. Derek wishes he could do more. All he’s done so far is try to talk the ex-alpha twins and Chris out of believing all these things are Stiles’s fault.

_Skinny, defenseless Stiles._

_I don’t think Stiles is smart enough to frame us for murder._

He’s been trying. He’s been fighting for Stiles. Because this thing is _not_ Stiles. The boy Derek knows is in there somewhere, clawing at the walls.

Derek wants to believe this.

Another surge of pain rocks through him. He hisses. He hadn’t taken his hand off Stiles’s arm. He leeches this away, too, with a bigger draught of it. It leaves him shaky—too much energy already spent tonight on healing himself, much less others.

Another surge. Another.

Derek frowns.

Something is wrong.

He’s on the verge of calling for Scott when Stiles stirs, practically in slow-motion. It’s a stark difference from his usual manic energy. Derek leans close, wary. “Stiles?” he says.

Stiles goes stock-still. Prey-still.

“Derek?” he says. His voice is cracked.

“Yeah . . . ?”

Stiles keeps his eyes closed. “Where am I?”

“Deaton’s,” Derek says. “He poisoned the fox.”

Stiles’s eyebrows wrinkle together. His whole face crinkles, then uncrinkles, then crinkles again. It’s the same face he makes when he’s parsing out information. “How long was I out?”

“You left the hospital two days ago.”

At that, Stiles opens his eyes. “Two _days_?” he repeats, expression aghast. 

Derek nods, confused.

“Two days? Two days. Fuck.” Then he holds his left hand up and stares at it. After a moment, he reaches over and picks up Derek’s left hand. His eyes, when he looks at Derek, are wide. He searches Derek’s face for something, roving over him, and it’s—slightly uncomfortable, like Derek is being measured. 

Stiles’s next breath is shuddering. He smells suddenly both relieved and deeply miserable.

“Stiles,” Derek says. “What’s wrong?” It’s impossible to ignore Stiles’s jackrabbit heartbeat from this close.

“Nothing,” Stiles says. It’s a lie. It’s the biggest lie Stiles has told Derek.

“Stiles.” Derek cups Stiles’s hand gently in his. He’s trying a softer touch, lately. His mom said they protected Beacon Hills—Derek wants to try that, and part of that is protecting Beacon Hills’s protectors. Stiles is definitely one of those, no matter what has hold of him. Stiles is important. Stiles needs to be saved. Out of everything in this mess, Derek knows that to be true.

He squeezes Stiles’s hand. “Tell me what happened.”

Stiles inhales. His pulse is erratic and fearful and alive. He pulls his hand away from Derek’s. “Nothing,” he says.

“I’m fine,” he says.


End file.
